There Should Be a Netflix Minus

Addison Rae is everywhere, and not just on my little phone screen where I watch her dance half-heartedly in a way that makes me want to DM her and tell her to take a mental health day. She must be tired. She just signed a deal with Netflix for an undisclosed amount of money after the tepid commercial success of He’s All That, a remake of the teen classic She’s All That conceived to sell home security systems and the concept of Addison Rae to Netflix subscribers.

But things are getting confusing. Netflix is releasing Marriage Story and The Trial of the Chicago 7 alongside Addison Rae’s oeuvre and The Kissing Booth trilogy To be clear, I’m engaging with all of these IPs, and I don’t think any of them are good. I watched Tall Girl five times and she wasn’t even that tall. It took me eight or nine days to watch David Fincher’s Mank in 22-minute bites. I pretended like it was a more boring version of Bojack Horseman to get through.

These films are all equally bad, but they’re bad in very distinct ways, and when you muddle them all together on a home screen it can be hard to tell the difference. More often than not, I am looking for mild laughs and hot thirty-year-olds playing high school sophomores. I am looking to screenshot some closed captioning for my green circle Instagram stories. I am looking for films like POMS and Dumplin. I am not looking for 9/11 documentaries, usually, ever. Confronted with so many options of so many different levels of gravity, I get decision fatigue. I leave Netflix and collect apples and gemstones in “Breath of the Wild” on a different screen all together. This is bad for Netflix. If the service can’t hold the attention of dullards like me because I can’t find a movie similar enough to the Netflix original Falling Inn Love to soothe me, then good luck getting someone to watch Snowpiercer again.

Here’s my solution: Netflix proper can have its Noah Baumbachs. Hell, it can even have You and Outer Banks. It can keep The Crown, and The People vs. OJ Simpson and The Kominsky Method and Inception. I don’t care, it can even keep Twilight and the Reese Witherspoon vehicle Home Again. But help me out by grouping the content together in ways that make sense for both my brain and my lifestyle: Netflix (for when someone I would like to impress is in my home) and Netflix Minus (for when I am alone and/or hungover).

Pluses are everywhere; it’s time for a Minus. Netflix Minus is where the good stuff is that embodies the core ethos of the passive watching experience: Addison Rae movies, the Austin Powers films, and My Girl 2. My Girl 1, controversially, stays on Netflix, and the same goes for Gilmore Girls; Netflix Minus gets seasons 1-3, Netflix gets seasons 4-7 and the reboot. I don’t like when Jess leaves! Also on Netflix Minus: the woke remake of One Day at a Time, Sexy Beasts, the Republican-themed Ashton Kutcher comedy The Ranch, anything Vanessa Anne Hudgens has ever made as an adult, those property twins that aren’t the Property Brothers, and Nailed It. You get the point. You can add to my list.

I propose that you have to pay an additional $15 a month for Netflix Minus. If you’re in financial hardship, you can have my password. I don’t care, it isn’t even my account anyway. It belongs to some guy named Travis I don’t know, and based on his viewing history, I know he’ll be a core part of the Netflix Minus base.